In 1967 a nuclear accident at a research facility near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania exposed three men to nearly fatal levels of radiation.
Bill Zemla survived the initial radiation exposure in 1967 but 34 years later was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, usually very treatable but this particular strain was to be non-responsive to usual therapy.
In his own words, Bill tells the story of how, during the climax of a stem cell transplant procedure, he experienced a nightmare filled 5 day period during which time he personally faced two choices, life or death. One miracle after another descended on Bill through the power of prayer generated from all corners of the nation. When Bill had awakened from the nightmares, God had miraculously given Bill his choice. It was life.
Bill delivered the following testimonial at the Natrona Heights Presbyterian Church on November 4, 2001, "All Saints Sunday"- celebrating the passing on of church members during the past year.
Outside the church dying leaves fell from majestic golden maples and chestnuts; fall was turning to winter. Ironically, Bill had a message of "life" to give to all who listened inside.
From Bill Zemla
I asked for this time to tell of the miraculous series of events that happened to me over the past several months. I invited a lot of my friends, neighbors and relatives that belong to other churches of this valley that participated in putting me on their prayer lists. I hope from what I have to say today they can take this message back to their churches to show what good their prayers have done.
To give you an idea how widespread this prayer list has been, I have been on prayer lists in Florida, North Carolina, Punxsutawney Pennsylvania, Canada, Alaska, Utah, Arizona and Texas, to name a few and they have all contributed heavily to what I have to tell you today. I also want to warn you that no matter how many times I tell this story, I become emotional so bear with me please.
The testimony I want to offer is not for myself but for the Natrona Heights Presbyterian Church and all the churches that participated. I think what I want to demonstrate is what you have done to fulfill the world purpose of God. Today I have heard a lot of people in the community and from our church complaining of petty differences in the church and bickering about this, that or the other thing when we should be concentrating our energies on more positive things. And the most positive thing you have done is for me.
For 5 years now, coming December I’ve battled with lymphoma You’ve always prayed for me through each procedure that I was about to get and each procedure failed. And I felt that on some Sunday’s when I came to church a bit embarrassed because you were praying for Bill again. These people are getting tired of this. But you hung in there and I am so grateful and glad that you did.
What I’d like to talk about today is miracles. A series of miracles happened to me over the past 3 months and I know they were largely your doing. How do you define a miracle? Is it really God working in extraordinary ways to help different people interjecting Himself to change the pattern of the outcome? I know a lot of you people here have witnessed miracles in your life only to have someone dismiss it with logic or chance and doubt if it really was a miracle. But when I’m done today if you don’t believe the miracle we’ve all wasted our time coming here today.
It all started back in July and August when it was decided that I had exhausted every kind of chemotherapy and other kinds of therapy that could help me. The last thing they could do was give me a bone marrow or stem cell transplant. And I’d like to just clarify that for a minute because some people said I had a stem cell transplant while others said I had a bone marrow transplant---it is one and the same. At one time the only way they could retrieve the stem cells was to get the bone marrow from a donor which was a painful process. But today they have ways of exciting the stem cells into the blood stream, extracting only the stem cells so it makes it a lot less unpleasant experience for the donor. And they have an international bone marrow/stem cell organization.
Part of the problem is, age 40-55 is about the cutoff because it is very expensive and it’s very dangerous. I had to go through a tremendous amount of convincing at age 65 that I was a viable candidate. First, I had to take a series of physical tests to show that I would be a viable candidate. They were shocked when the results came back---my body was 40 years old.
So, I managed to get into the program both for the insurance company and for the international bone marrow donor program. That in itself, was a miracle because the odds against it were very high. But people prayed for me. On Sundays when it was announced that it was what I was going to go for---the prayers were there and it happened. Okay, maybe that’s just chance but I consider it a miracle.
When they finally found me a bone marrow donor, doctors said I could have the bone marrow done around the middle of August. But as it turned out the donor could not supply enough stem cells. So they told me you are going to have to wait and they thought I would be very disappointed but I said perhaps the next donor will be even better.
In about three weeks they called me up again, they had found me another donor. I was to be down at the hospital on August 27th for the first chemo treatment. Well, I explained to you before that this is a dangerous procedure. They give you so much chemo that they completely kill your immune system and damage lot of other organs in your body.
So I went down on the 27th and got my final chemo treatment, had a couple days off and on Saturday, the first, I got my cell transplant. The doctors were very pleased because they said the fellow who gave the donation this time had triple the number of stem cells they needed. So as it turned out it was a better transplant.
I went home but had to go back in on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 4th and 5th. When I came home on the 5th, I was kind of worn out from the treatments and I laid down on the bed. Stella came to get me for supper and found out I had a temperature of 101.4. That lady saved my life! She went into action, got everything arranged and got me to the hospital right away.
When I went down to West Penn Hospital all I remember is a blur of activity. People sticking needles in me every which way, rushing me from one room to the other in this very frantic pace. And it was pretty much of a blur. I knew where I was but not for very long. At one point, I totally lost contact with the real world and began to have these incredible nightmares, hallucinations from all the drugs. It was the worst drug thing you could ever have. And I wish there was some way that I could capture it on film and make every teenager in the United States, experience what I did and I assure you they wouldn’t go foolin’ around with drugs. It was the most terrifying time I’ve ever had in my life. The only way I could make the nightmares stop was to open my eyes. And I was aware that I was in the hospital but this went on for an eternity, trying to sleep on a blinking basis.
But finally, it reached a climax to where the nightmares got so terrifying, that the final thing I remember is being flung out into outer space, rolled up in these bubbles in an incredible windstorm. I was tossed and bounced around like I was in a hurricane. And, I didn’t know what in the world was coming of it. Finally everything stopped. And I was standing on an edge of a cliff, very quiet and very dark. This part was totally different from a hallucination---this part was real. I stood on this cliff and there was an abyss in front of me and something was pulling me by my arms, forward. I knew, if I yielded and went forward, it was over. I was gone.
And I prayed with every fiber in my body. God give me strength, let me get my balance. As I teetered back and forth it seemed so easy to just go forward and let go. And then I felt the power of all those prayers and the love. I can’t describe it, I wish there were words that could describe it. It was there---this power. I kept thinking to myself, you’re going to let an awful lot of people down if you slip and I saw Stella’s image and I pulled with every fiber in my body and I got back and I got my balance. I took one step backwards and when I did that, I experienced the most incredible pain I’ve ever felt in my life. It was as if I said, "Okay now I choose life and now I have to choose the reality of what I’m suffering."
They say God only gives you what you can stand---I no longer believe that. I went beyond the limits of endurance. I didn’t think I could take it another second and it kept getting worse. But, I had chosen life! So, I suffered through the pain and I woke up finally with a snap and I realized I was in a hospital room and I was conscious. I looked on either side of me and I counted 12 IV bags going in me, in my jugular vein, both arms. All I knew, I was spread eagle and I couldn’t move anything but my eyes.
I finally dosed off only to wake up the next morning to hear a lot of commotion. When I looked up I saw on television the second plane hit the towers as it actually happened and I thought I was losing my mind. Hallucinations are one thing, but seeing this as reality I just couldn’t grasp what was really happening.
A few minutes later, my oncologist walked in, grabbed my hand, squeezed it and shook it and said, "Buddy you made a believer out of me!" Because the last year and a half I have been beating his ears off about having strong faith, having people pray for you, keep yourself physically strong, and be in the right frame of mind.
I didn’t know that I had had severe kidney and liver damage. At one point while I was in my hallucinatory state, they called Stella to tell her that my liver was so badly damaged that they had to make a choice. If they treated me, I could probably hemorrhage to death very likely but if they didn’t treat me I was certainly going to die. She told them to go for it. And, it worked---- a miracle! By all odds, I should not have recovered.
Later in the evening, the main head of the oncology department came in with all the interns, all the doctors, woke me up by shaking my foot and said, "Ladies and gentlemen you are looking at the strongest man I‘ve ever seen." I’m lying there just able to move my eyes, I can’t figure out were this guy is coming from. Here I was, blown up with almost 20 lbs of water from all these fluids they were pumping in me and I felt like a big life raft just floating around in the bed.
So I had a couple weeks just looking at the ceiling, that’s about all I could do, except going to the bathroom every ½ hour and to think is this what God saved me for? But He’s not done with me yet. He’s got me around for some purpose.
Towards the end of the day a nurse came in and said, "I asked to have you today as my patient. Word all over the hospital is that you survived impossible odds. And I’d like to know just exactly--- how did you do that?" So, off and on all day I told her about how to get herself spiritually prepared and at the end of the day she came in, put my hands to her cheek cried and said, "You’ve changed my life!"
That was a tremendous thing to have someone say to you. And I thought, gee, maybe God has something for me to do yet.
So now I started to develop another form of the disease called graft vs. host disease. That’s where my body is trying to reject the transplanted stem cells. One of the male nurses that I have dealt with on a special project last year came in. I had tried an alternative chemo method in a group study that didn’t work.
Later he came in and he said, "You know what, Bill? There’s a pharmaceutical company in California conducting a trial study program just for your type of problem. And what they’re doing is using a standard drug that has been pretty successful against a new test drug. But the problem is that to get into this program you have to be sick enough to get in but not too well that it won’t work. And he said there is a high death risk rate just from this.
He said, " What do you want to do?"
I said "Well, go for it!"
He said, "Well, I don’t want to get you hopes up for there is only about an 8% chance you can get into the program. As far as the test run goes, this hospital has never gotten the test run."
He said, "That’s kind of unusual, because here, we are the pioneers in stem cell transplant".
My hospital was around when I had my radiation accident and the fellow that was with me in the accident had the stem cell transplant. That was the very first one done in the United States. So, he returned and had me sign the forms just in case we were accepted and they made the request.
The next day he came in grinning from ear to ear saying, "We got you in the program and you got the test drug. There are only 44 people in the United States who are going to be getting the test drug. Miracle! I got in and the odds of getting that drug were almost impossible.
He said, "Here’s the problem--you’ve got to take it for 14 days in a row and for 8-10 times out of the hospital. And we have to follow you for 100 days." He said, "There is also risk involved with it and pain. A couple people who were lucky enough to get the test, couldn’t tolerate the pain, had to abort the treatment - we lost all that information. But we were able to convince the people that if you get the test drug, you would stick it out."
They gave me a morphine trigger and told me to use the trigger to try and get through the pain. The first night was the only time I had a problem. I felt like I was in a box being squeezed, like getting a blood pressure test being done on your whole body. But after that there was no problem at all.
Then they came in and told me a patient in the next room was on the program with the standard drug. He had a little bit different problems and he was a little bit younger. A couple days later I asked how he was making out and they said that he didn’t make it. I was very disappointed to hear that. So, like I said, the pain wasn’t that bad, I got through the test fairly well and now I am continuing to get treatments.
There’s a woman that has to evaluate me, her name is Valerie and she comes in every seven days to check on how I’m doing with this treatment. She’s from another area in order to be an objective observer. The first day when I took the treatment she came in. I was in pretty bad shape. She said, "You’ll do better." Seven days later I’m sitting up in bed. She couldn’t believe it. Seven days after that when she came in and asked "How are you doing today? I told her, "Stay where you are." I got out of the bed, picked her up and hugged her. She started to cry, "I’ve never seen anything like that in my life."
They told me that probably in three or four months, if I’m lucky, I’ll start making my own platelets and red cells. I started making them before I left the hospital. Miracle!
I’m not out of the woods yet. It takes a year before you’ll know if this thing has taken or not. Anything could happen in the meantime. I am still fighting the graft rejection at this time but I’m confident that I’m going to make it. And in whatever time God has given me, I’m going to use wisely. But I’m thinking, what will I do, where do I go from here?
When I got home, I had to call a friend of mine from Salt Lake City. Some of you in the congregation know, I have a friend who is a pretty well known artist. He, his wife and my wife Stella and I have been close for many years and we keep in touch. So I called to thank him for a bouquet of flowers he sent while I was in the hospital. I wasn’t allowed to have them, but he didn’t know that. But when I called to thank him he said, "Thank me, I want to thank you."
What had happened was, before I went in the hospital he called me one night and asked me if I would talk with his wife. She was hysterical---she had just found out that she got colon cancer and was going to have to have surgery around the 6th of September. So I got on the phone and talked with her for about ½ hour. When we were finished we hung up and she said to Joe, "Bill said it’s going to be fine." So he told me while I was in the hospital she went and got her surgery. The doctor told him that because she was so calm--- so relaxed, the surgery went well. They took a foot of her intestine out and all the cancer -it was 95% free. Maybe this is it. Maybe I was going to be the person to help someone. Help them get through what I have gone through. Cause I’m just an average guy; with a lot of faith, a lot of prayer power from you.
I try to keep myself physically fit. If I can do it---anyone can do it! Like I told you, I promised you a miracle. You’re lookin’ at it. I should not be here today. Remember when I said my doctor told me I was the strongest man he ever met. He meant the total package---spirit---mind----body, everything. Because he told me that I’ve had between 80-90 different doses of chemo. As far as they can tell, no-one on the planet has had that much chemo and is still here to tell about it.
Please pray with me...
Dear Lord, in light of the recent New York tragedy let us put our differences aside and unite us as a nation. Let us, also, as a church, put aside the small unnecessary issues and focus on the important work you would have us do. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
Go back to the Beginning
transcribed by Carol Rebhun
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Go back to the Beginning
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